[project]Port android to meizu M8

I've been following this thread since the start, and I cant believe how far you guys have come! It's really great to see all this talent gathered in one thread!
Keep up the good work you guys!

And ofc, if testers are needed, sign me up!!

I just decided that this evening i would take the time to write a HowTo on the topic. So more users could compile and try kernels on their phone.
And i think mre dev == more success.
So stay tuned if you want to participate

First draft:
http://members.lycos.nl/phunbringer/...nuxm8howto.txt
I will add URL, paramters and pathes when im @ home.

P.S: if anyone follows these steps it would be nice if one could take screenshots.

hey r3wDy,

that would be very very nice! i also would like to do some development, but most times, i haven't got the time (work & studies ).... but if you would write a howto, it would be much easier, because i / we haven't got to read the whole thread multiple times....

i hope you are able to do it soon,

raoul

aloha boys and girls ;-)
i must say.. i like it , a lot!


maybe our artfans could make a nice bootlogo for your nice little kernel
I was browsing the web and came acros this howto , it is interesting to read and know. I also found again the index page for the machine id´s here at arm linux .

R3wdy,

more work on get fat32 fs / NAND(maybe MMC) supports work, and place rootfs on nand disk.

i think you mean that you want to re-partition /disk with an ext FS ? But ofcourse you will need to have a driver to load the /disk drive? (just to make sure how you are working at the moment)

if you would write a howto, it would be much easier,

decided that this evening i would take the time to write a HowTo

Well that is actually a good idea, since i had to much work to do i am clearing my schedule @work so will have some more free time @home.
I will clean up the thread in the coming days so all hyperlinks, information,.. get stored in the first post cause now it is a bit cloudy

i think mre dev == more success

i completly agree and thank you very much for the write-up!

Btw R3wdy, are there any portable tools that can be used? Then i could have a try while beeing @work when i have nothing to do ;-)

ps, i was wondering, did you manage to acces the whole ram or is it still a safe part you are using?
And when you managed to get a bootable kernel, would it be able to boot from other bootloaders? since i am overlooking on qi/uboot so in case i find the jtag we could create a dualboot/dedicated boot?

pps, i am happy we kept this topic alive, now it could be time for the mods to make a newspost of it on the frontpage and spread the word on meizu bbs so we could have some more developers?

i think you mean that you want to re-partition /disk with an ext FS ? But ofcourse you will need to have a driver to load the /disk drive? (just to make sure how you are working at the moment)

no, left it as fat32, and mount /dev/hsmmc1 -> /mnt/disk, use /mnt/disk/android as new rootfs.
or a growable dummy image on disk, we use it's contents as a root media.
I have some very lite graphic support functions in loader, if I rip button / touch support from driver, maybe we can make a customized CE image that can boot into android and CE6 by click loader menu.

Originally Posted by evow04

maybe our artfans could make a nice bootlogo for your nice little kernel

Im up to the challenge!

Ive followed this thread since the very beginning, and im really excited to see how far you guys have come. Soooo close!

(im thinking something in the ways of the Hero boot logo, as long as were still talking Android. Maybe a droid pupping up behind a Meizu M? )

The the mem:
We use 16mb of ram right now
It seens we get problems when accessing more but we are not sure. We will look at this topic later when we have a filesystem.

To the tools:
Theroreticly u could use a Cross compiler for arm/ce exe files from linux to gain the same result.
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/wince-xcompile/) this may be interesting to try

But i dont know if such a compiler exists or can be done so the easiest way is using visual studio...
M8pack is written in Qt and shuld compile just fine under linux

To the bootloader:
We can use every bootloader as long we could get it on the device. And without jtag just flashing an uboot is like russian roulette
UBoot in fact would make some things even easeir for us (no need of writing init code or compile a xip file)

We should be carefull ith spread the news. We reached nothing till now but a booting kernel... i think till android it could be a long way But we will see Everytime when im at work banxian does some new wired things ^^

Originally Posted by banxian

we can make a customized CE image that can boot into android and CE6 by click loader menu.

that would be great!

@Coninsan, maybe we could open up a dedicated topic for this, let people vote for the best artwork and if we all agree we could use it?
(for example : bootlogo, grapical bootloader menu,..?)

we have a filesystem

banxian,r3wdy look at pm, maybe this is something?

We reached nothing

beeing honest, it is an amazing job so far?!
and any help is welcome?

btw, i spoke to stskeep, tmzt, lbt and someother guys @
mer irc , they invite you over to discus this matther.
They are willing to help you out with the current problems and do not really matther if it is android/mer/.. you are willing to run, as lon as it is opensourse software.

I think they could provide you a boost with this?

btw thanks for the write-up!
About Jtag, i know it would be very usefull.
problem is we need to known what vcc is to get started and normally it should be 3.3 v so untill someone gets such a reading we are stuck unless we could desolder the s3c6410 but then we need a broken device but so far i can not find one and buying on for 200 bucks is a bit expensive :P

i opened :
[project] Bootlogo´s / Bootmenu´s



So we can continu the quest overhere :-)

i opened:
[HowTo] build / boot a linux kernel on M8

Any questions which belong to get a development system up and running please in there.
thx

Thanks for it!

I am re-arranging post 1 of this topic,
that will make it easier but i will need to do it in a few parts:
lots of hyperlinks to copy over:P

r3wdy question,
since you were using the serial/usb port,
doess it seems to you that usb could be used as otg usb?
(i would love to see this ,more..)

there is a s3c usb otg driver in kernel but this is far out of reach ^^ for now...

ok thanks

btw dump question,
for now you load the kernel directly after eboot,
would it be possible that there is some coded system that get launched directly after eboot, that provides a visual interface with capacity of mounting /disk.
This to select the wanted os by touchscreen///volume keys + m key.
Then jumpstart to ce / linux kernel?

Or will this deliver problems because you allreday loaded some drivers?
It would be an easy solution for the thing you need to do everytime now;
making xip.bin, flash it in, remove it flash ce in,...
Then you could just store a for example : Wince.bin and linux.bin on /disk.
If wanted to run an other test kernl you could just load it in through usb mode , restart and done, no need for backing up and flashing

edit:
as you may notice , i re-arranged the first page.
I could begin with sorting the hyperlinks, but i have not that much time,
if someone wants to do it, be my guest :-)
--> Maybe we could start from now on to document hyperlinks in a good way, this to make it easier in the future?

To the Bootloader thing:
I think this would be possible, because the Kernel is not directly startet by the bootloader. There is a small linux loader which contains the the kernel. This is loaded.
I dont know how much work it would be to get dualbooting system but it is possible from my point of view.

But at first we need to get a Linux to run. I had a small system running with a busybox shell but a touchscreen is not that good to input text ^^

So i will build a serial console this evening. Still our biggest problem is the storage. We need access to the moviNAND flash to use this as filesystem.

But accessing a flash is more complex than accesing an hard drive because of badblock management and stuff.
Truly said: at the moment i have no idea from this and so we need to find informations about this on the net.
Once we have a file system i think we could try install a android system to see how it worx.
And then we must see what hardware is supportet by android and how is overall performs on the m8.
Its still a long way to go to get android running, and from now we cant say if it will be better or more usable than meizuos.
we will see

@banxian

I decided to create another kernel build to tinker with.

I will use this one

android.git.kernel.org Git - kernel/common.git/shortlog

Thats an offical android kernel. I found this
About Google Android: S3C6410

And will download this kernel patch it with the noted patchfiles and build it. then i will see and hopefully i worx

Fuck i forget to make beatiful links :/ next time ^^

Okay okay i looked at it and it doenst even support s3c6410 arch...

I will give it a try with the patch but for now i think we stay with our kernel

because.. as i remeber aesop is a android phone too so the kernel should have all the android patches already. so we need to access the flashcard and the compile the andrioid stack and try

we need a roadmap or something

Originally Posted by r3wDy

Fuck i forget to make beatiful links :/ next time ^^

no worries

Have a look onto "kandroid"
they seem to have a very nice git for the s3c6410 with lots of support.

There are also some other links in the first page but i would need to have a good look to find it right away :P


edit:
Kandroid git android 1.0 (s3c6410)
Kandroid landingspage (s3c6410)

edit 2:
(and i think about 6 pages back i found a link that describes the whole compiling proces for this cpu could be usefull for you?)
=>
like mentionned on page 11 :
S3C6410 Android porting step by step!

edit 3 :

So i will build a serial console this evening. Still our biggest problem is the storage. We need access to the moviNAND flash to use this as filesystem.

will see if i can determ what type of chip is been used as movinand, maybe i can find a generic driver or so.

To the Bootloader thing

if accesing to Movinand works we can discuss it once again.

a serial console

did you manage to get serial port rx and tx to work?

we will see

indeed ;-)

will see if i can determ what type of chip is been used as movinand, maybe i can find a generic driver or so.

I know which chip is inside m8 there eneugh photos of it
The problem is more the kernel needs support for this kind of flash.

I saw in some changelogs that support for root filesystem on such devices is present but i need a kernel with this patches in.
As seen in this changelog
http://www.aesop.or.kr/svn/aesop-s3c...21.5/Changelog
in the aesop kernel is some nice stuff innit. But i dont now which version i have.
i will see... maybe try the kandroid kernel. the good thing is, we can try every kernel we want.

Another problem is the layout of android. what is it? im about to port a system of which i know nothing :D
i need to read some stuff about it. The android framework is just the filesystem with the compiled android files and this runs on a android ready kernel. so i think our kernel is android ready. so if we could get the flash to work i think we could compile the framework and see what happens...
i would sacrifice my movinand for this (i think at first its easier to format the movinan yaffs2 but this would mean to format it) the problem is: i i do that all data is away and i dont know if you can get this easy back to fat file system. (anyone tried to format the flash chip from meizu os?) dunno need to read about ^^

eneugh photos of it

sorry am a bit tired and lazy today..
did not check them yet

easier to format the movinan yaffs2 but this would mean to format it

since you have buntu running in VM, you could try to connect in activesync modus, and see if you can mount the m8 movinand ?
Usb-mode wont do it cause then you will only find /disk.
And i would not partition whole movienand, cause going to wince original core through /windows folder let you run the disk tool.
There you would see it seems to be that the movienand is partioned in 2 fs.
Normally the fs should be restored while rebooting but you never know...

I will finished moving today.
I think there may be no addon file required to support moviNand,
maybe directly treat it as MMC, maybe some file already slightly hacked by samsung to compatibe it. samsung only placed oneNand driver in their source separated.